Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 15Yet although all the above may seem uncontroversial, the relationshipbetween Aristotelianism and medicine has long been a neglected area inscholarship on ancient medicine. The medical background of Aristotle’sbiological and physiological theories has long been underestimated by amajority of Aristotelian scholars – and if it was considered at all, it tended tobe subject to gross simplification. 21 Likewise, on the medico-historical side,the contribution made by Aristotelianism to the development of medicinehas long been largely ignored, especially as far as the later history of thePeripatetic school is concerned. 22 This seems to be due to a most unfortunatedisciplinary dividing line between philosophers and historians ofmedicine: while the former used to regard the medical aspects of Aristotelianthought as philosophically less interesting, the latter usually did not engagein Aristotelianism because it was believed to be philosophy not medicine.These attitudes appear to have been based on what I regard as a misunderstandingof the Aristotelian view on the status of medicine as a scienceand its relationship to biology and physics, and on the erroneous beliefthat no independent medical research took place within the Aristotelianschool. Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical sciences issometimes believed to imply that, while doctors were primarily concernedwith practical application, philosophers only took a theoretical interest inmedical subjects. 23 As we have seen above, there are important exceptionsto this rule; and Aristotle’s own activities in the medical domain, too, havebeen more significant than has sometimes been appreciated. It is true thatAristotle was one of the first to spell out the differences between medicineand natural philosophy; but, as I argue in chapters 6 and 9, it is oftenignored that the point of the passages in which he does so is to stressthe substantial overlap that existed between the two areas. And Aristotleis making this point in the context of a theoretical, physicist account ofpsycho-physical functions, where he is wearing the hat of the phusikos, the‘student of nature’; but this seems not to have prevented him from dealingwith more specialised medical topics in different, more ‘practical’ contexts.That such more practical, specialised treatments existed is suggested by thefact that in the indirect tradition Aristotle is credited with several writingson medical themes and with a number of doctrines on rather specialisedmedical topics. And as I argue in chapter 9, one of those medical worksmay well be identical to the text that survives in the form of book 10 of hisHistory of Animals.21 For a discussion of an example of such simplification see ch. 9.22 Thus a recent medico-historical textbook like Conrad et al. (1995) devotes only two pages to Aristotle,and makes no reference at all to Theophrastus or the later Peripatos.23 For a fuller discussion see ch. 9.